Call Us Now: 760-550-7474

Issues

It is understood that truth takes a holiday when it comes to political speech, but there has
to be limits! This constant drumbeat from the Western Manufactured Housing Communities
Association (mobile-home park owners) that rent control has cost Oceanside taxpayers
more than $7.5 million and will cost more than $8 million in the next 10 years is the biggest lie of all.

The source for these financial statistics is a "study" performed by the San Diego Taxpayers
Advocate. This study is deeply flawed, and is clearly inaccurate. But it is touted as "independent."
Yes. Independent and incompetent.

A reply to the NC Times Editoral endorsing No on E written by Mike Crogan

Yup, you gotta love NCT. Where is it written that a park owner is forbidden to write a lease agreement
forbidding the tenant to sublet the property? Should I mention the number of leases I have signed as
tenant over the years that stipulate I am barred from subletting the property? Should I mention the number
of leases I have signed as property owner that stipulated that the tenant be barred from subletting the
property? Should I recite all the stories I've heard over the years of tenants being threatened with or actually
being evicted for subletting?

For those of you who have never viewed a 460 Form it can be very confusing. The summary below
is accumulative figures for Oceanside Park owners donations to YES on E, Tax Payers & Property
Owners for Fairness Sponsored by Western Manufactured Housing Communities Assn. (WMA) Issues
PAC for Rental Fairness, THROUGH 5/19/12/12.

We are seeing an increase in elected representatives being adversarial to the people that
elected them. We see it in local, state and national levels. Often, they reveal before the
election how they intend to work more against the people than for them.

We see this in Oceanside, where City Council members Jerry Kern, Gary Felien and
Jack Feller are revealing their intentions beyond the November election. Their stratagems
are Propositions E and F. Prop. E, vacancy decontrol, is an agenda to eventually dislocate
mobile-home residents for developers, and Prop. F is a device to eliminate city council
candidates with limited means, by requiring a majority vote or a run-off election.

These council members are not afraid to show their hand before November, which can only
mean they are confident the voters are apathetic or misinformed by the heavily financed
campaigning being directed at them.

If enough voters let themselves be taken in by this, we are all the losers, not just mobile-home
residents and city council hopefuls with modest means. Permitting these clearly contrary
representatives to have their way now, on E and F, will open the floodgates to let in the future
impositions of the interests they are really serving.

It is more than a little counterintuitive for this newspaper to support rent control, but after reading all
the commentary and studying the initiative itself, we believe Oceanside's Proposition E should be defeated.

We do not believe the Oceanside City Council should have instituted rent control over mobile-home
parks in 1985 ---- it was, at best, an ungainly example of government micromanagement of the economy.
In our view, it represented seizure of private assets by the government.

However, in the more than a quarter-century since rent control was imposed on Oceanside's mobile-home
parks, many people have purchased mobile homes under the reasonable assumption that rent control
was city policy and would remain so.

Letter to the Editor written by Lizbeth Altman of Oceanside, in the NC Times, Dated May 9

Protect yourself; reject Prop. E
"It used to be quiet and well kept, filled mostly by retirees, and everyone owned their mobile homes.
But the trailer park eventually switched hands, and, overnight, things changed. Suddenly it was a
rental neighborhood: tenants constantly driving in, driving out, heavy bass rattling the wafer-thin walls,
and the Wilmington police made regular visits ---- drug busts and domestic disturbances"
("Murder of a nobody," April 14, http://truth-out.org).

Substitute "Oceanside" for "Wilmington," and substitute "Proposition E, the Jerry Kern, Jack Feller
and Gary Felien vacancy decontrol ordinance," as the reason for the overnight change from ownership
pride to rental unit park, and you have a not-very-pretty picture of the future of Oceanside's 16 mobile-home
parks without rent control.

Once fixed-income seniors, veterans and the disabled no longer can afford to buy Oceanside's mobile homes
because space rent skyrockets without rent control, mobile-home parks can become the high-rent neighborhoods
that attract only renters other landlords would not consider. The landlord making even bigger ocean liners full of
money from all the mobile homes bought for pennies on the dollar if rent control is lost will be out-of-town park
owners personally not affected by exploding public safety problems and costs.

Being on the right side of an issue doesn't seem to matter much anymore in our political system.
It turns out the side or candidate with the most money wins over 80 percent of the time.

For Proposition E, voting NO is clearly the right thing, the fair thing to do for the thousands of park
resident affected by this vote. But the YES side has about six to eight times as much money to
spend; it just doesn't look very good for the victims of this proposition.

There is not a single valid reason for Oceanside to vote yes on this proposition, but it doesn't appear
to matter since the money suggests the good guys don't have much chance to save their homes.

If the reasons put forward for passing Proposition E are examined, they can each be shown to be
either pure fabrications or grossly exaggerated. For instance, proponents say "It will be good for
Oceanside"; they don't say how, just that it will "be good for Oceanside."

Oceanside mobile-home park owners have a political action committee, Yes on E, which has been
collecting and spending megatons of money to promote their June 5 Oceanside ballot measure,
Proposition E.
By March 17, $268,299.50 in donations and $105,509.29 in expenditures was reported by their PAC
on campaign disclosures. Imagine how that much money spent in Oceanside could benefit our city's economy.

Sadly for Oceanside, in the months since this PAC was formed last June till March 17, a mere
$1,583.75 went to Oceanside cash registers. Most of that amount, $1,097, was for postage paid
at an Oceanside post office. The park owners' PAC spent the balance of $103,925.54 creating
out-of-town sales tax and jobs.

This vacancy decontrol thing is upsetting my life. I wanted to think about other things when I retired,
but now I have to fight City Hall. Vacancy decontrol overturns settled law, a law that this Supreme
Court found to be so sound, fair and just that they kicked out an attack on the law without comment.

Not to be outdone, park owners got the law rewritten. The law they want says that they can raise the
space rent without limit on new home owners. That's the text of the law ---- rent raises without limit. Is
that OK if my space rent only goes up with the cost of living? Let's look at the consequences.

The first one is that it wipes out my equity. That's right, I own my own home. It's hard to get a loan
on mobile homes, too, but I did it. I wouldn't know if there are government programs to help people
buy mobile homes. I didn't look for any. I shopped around for great neighborhoods, and I bought into
the best I could afford.

As part of their efforts to turn voters against rent control for seniors, veterans and the very
elderly in Oceanside mobile home parks, Amy Epsten, park owner spokesperson, and
some of the park owner mailers have pointed out that some mobile homes under rent
control are being used in ways that, according to my reading of section 798.21, would
be a violation of state law.

Then why are park owners working to get rid of rent control using that reason when they
can just implement the existing law? Smoke and mirrors, that's why.

If a mobile home is not a principal place of residency, park owners can use the already
existing laws to remedy what they state as an abuse. Again, false claims to confuse voters
for their own abusive financial gain on property that belongs to the buyers of their mobile homes,
without paying for it.